Oh, Glory
by gryffinclaw19
Summary: Maybe what Razgut needs isn't glory, after all. Moments from a thousand years of a Fallen seraph's life. (Minor spoilers for DGM)
1. Wish Upon a Star

_He gave an impatient flick of the hand. "I've fallen further."  
__Karou was skeptical. The minaret towered overhead, the tallest structure in the city.  
Seeing her glance up at it, Razgut chuckled again. It was a curdled sound: mangled misery and spite.  
"That's nothing, blue lovely. A thousand years ago, I fell_ from heaven_."_

* * *

Razgut was a living pain tithe.

He had once been a seraph, but now he was a thing of bruises and blood and brokenness. They had torn off his wings, oh, his glorious wings. Fiery feathers had swirled around him, caught in the eddies of his screams. Razgut had caught one in his fingers slick with blood, gazed at it for a long time as it dimmed to ash, crumbled in his hands.

But they weren't content with dimming his fire, oh no. They had to cast him out of a slash in the sky as well, make sure he never returned.

But if they thought he would beg for mercy, they were sorely mistaken. He was a Faerer, after all: one of the chosen Twelve. They could tear off his wings and beat him bloody, but they couldn't take that pride and glory away from him. Oh, spite. Oh, misery.

Even now, the seraph soldiers depended on him as they dragged him over the Bay of Beasts toward the portal. _His _portal.

Razgut remembered making that rip of sky with nothing more than his fingers and the force of his will. He had rent through the air and looked down at that other world – Earth – with all the discoverer's right of possession. Its sun had been so young and bright and golden, a seraph of its own.

Now there was only deepest night, a host of dazzling constellations. Razgut had seen many wonders in the pages of the universes that he had traveled, but even he gasped in that moment to see their glory.

Then the seraph soldier hoisted Razgut by one bloody wing-spur and, without preamble, thrust him into another world.

For an instant, Razgut forgot his pain as he hung motionless in a sea of stars. He even forgot that he had no wings. Then gravity began its inexorable pull, and Razgut's wonder turned to shock - and then to terror.

He was flightless, helpless, hopeless.

So Razgut fell faster and faster, twisting through the air with dizzying speed. The stars around him blurred to streaks of light, until it seemed they must be torn from the sky; and he was one of them, too, a falling star.

Through a distant slash of night, several smoldering feathers drifted down after him, winking out of existence one by one.

.

.

.

And, in the Morocco desert far below, a child looked up and made a wish.


	2. Nectar and Salt

_Eager to be helpful, Razgut supplied, "She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox's tongue. She tastes like_ hope_."_

* * *

The wish-daughter leaned forward, and a rush of lapis hair revealed her slender neck.

Razgut couldn't help himself. He licked her skin once – fleetingly, achingly – and felt her tense and jerk back.

But not before he had gotten his taste.

Her flavor blossomed on his tongue, and he closed his eyes, rapturous. Izîl had tasted like the rust of his pliers, already decaying from the curiosity that gnawed from within. This girl tasted of _life_, like a night flower just beginning to open.

He tasted pollen and nectar, half-remembered from blossoms in a world of angels.

He tasted the first, crisp bite of an apple, bartered from a vendor in the heat of a Moroccan summer.

He tasted hinges, the metallic sense of a new portal being opened.

He tasted the fairy tales of the rich tribal language translated by Izîl: the midnight glow of a swan maiden; the single, stolen drop of cream on a fox's tongue.

He tasted the utter loneliness of a hollow soul, beautiful as pain.

He tasted the whisper and prayer of hope, spoken in a voice as deep as silence.

He tasted _stars_.

At this last, Razgut felt a longing such that he had not experienced for a thousand years.

.

.

.

And he felt another flavor add itself to the mix: the salt of his own tears.


	3. Promise of a Shadow

_Coaxing, he purred, "I'll tell you secrets, like I told Izîl."  
__"Ask for something else," Karou snapped. "I will not carry you. Ever."  
__"Oh, but I'll keep you warm. I'll braid your hair. You'll never be lonely again."_

* * *

Their human lives passed so quickly: mayflies in a summer storm, cobwebs in an elephant's wake. Razgut's beggar mules died as quietly as they had lived, with no one to mourn them.

No one, that is, but him.

Razgut was haunted by them, the humans. He would never admit it aloud, of course - who would understand the language of angels if he did? - but he felt a strange connection to these beings who spent their whole lives in shadows.

It was no great tragedy, he told himself, that they should die from one.

Razgut's pain was a constant now, ever-throbbing in his ragged wing spurs and pulverized legs. He delved into it, _lived_ in it, fashioning himself an invisibility such as he had learned centuries ago from the magi. No one spared a downward glance for a misshapen shadow among the glorious hues of Morocco.

At first, he had dragged himself painfully along the unforgiving earth, every inch a fresh ordeal. His arms, at first spindly from lack of nutrition, became unyielding.

So, when the first unlucky beggar had stumbled by, Razgut was able to secure a vice-like grip around his neck. The human had soon gone mad from the incessant whispering - susurrous yet sinister - that came from the invisible hump on his back. Razgut had felt no pity for him then, immersed as he was in his own agony.

This was how the Fallen seraph spent his thousand years in Morocco: watching civilizations flourish and die from his perch on a shadow's back.

Until Izîl had made his wish.

Razgut had sensed the devilish magic - _oh, __a bruised sky, an eclipse of beasts_ \- somewhere in the tangled streets of Marrakesh, and had dragged himself toward it, knowing that it was of something that did not belong to this world.

The man had been seated cross-legged, his head bowed over a metal disc the size of a dinner plate - a bruxis, Izîl had later called it - that glinted darkly gold against the cream of his djellaba.

Razgut inched closer along the baked stones, keeping to the shadows despite his invisibility. He was struck by the alarming sense that the magic might _reveal _him, and yet he could not keep away. This metal inspired no gold-lust for him, but the Fallen seraph was drawn to it as inexorably as a salmon is lured back to its natal stream. He was so close that he could hear the man's laborious breaths and make out the burnished grooves of an engraving.

Then the human muttered a phrase that seemed to leave him as hoarse as if he had recited an epic - and the bruxis vanished, simple as that.

Except.

Razgut felt a _pull_ deep inside him: at the same time he could see, through his pain-infused vision, black-gold tendrils of magic ensnare him and bind him. To the human. To Izîl.

Only later did he realize that this enchantment had broken the barrier of language between them: now, he knew only that the man's hopeful face had fallen as he cast himself to the ground in despair. "All that pain for what? I wish for knowledge and I receive only nothingness. How can I face the old monster again?"

It was too easy.

Izîl did not notice the shadow that crept up behind him until he felt thin arms around his neck - bound by something more than strength - and heard a whispered, malefic promise in his ear:

"You want knowledge? I can give you that.

.

.

.

I can give you more than you ever wished for."

* * *

**A/N: Thanks for reading so far... bonus points if you can guess where the phrase in the first sentence of the third paragraph comes from.**


	4. Twice-Fallen

_Bereft of his human, he was splayed out over the ground. One arm had been crushed; he cradled it to his chest and dragged himself with the other, legs limp behind him. And his head, his awful purple head, was flattened at the temple, crusted with dried blood, and still embedded with rocks and broken glass._

* * *

Falling again was almost worse the second time, because he knew of the agony that followed. Only a handful of seconds passed between the top of the minaret and the looming earth, but to Razgut it felt like an age. He was helpless to fight against the magic that bound him, even now, to Izîl.

Then, the impact.

Razgut knew Izîl had not survived as soon as he heard the sound of brittle ribs breaking against the stones. The other humans exclaimed in dismay, but Razgut had no such sympathy. Izîl had been broken inside even before the encounter with this fire-eyed seraph, and death was the last wish he could have been granted.

Only after this realization did Razgut think to feel his own pain; having been acknowledged, it swamped his body and mind, enough to make a thousand portals and more than enough to sustain the invisibility that he had cast, almost unconsciously, as he had landed.

Unable to be extricated, one arm was still wrapped around his mule - the body rapidly growing cold - and was more a mass of splinters than bones. His head burned at the temple on the side it had landed, soldered as it was with diamondlike shards of glass.

As if to mock Razgut's pain, the angel took flight from the minaret on glamoured wings. The twice-fallen seraph followed him with hungry eyes, and knew.

He held no hope that he would be brought home now. The fire-eyed seraph had made _that_ clear, his perfect, mythic features echoing familiar disgust.

Only a wish could save him. Razgut had often pleaded that Izîl might procure one for him, despite knowing that the bruxis' bind could only be broken by a wish of the same magnitude. But now he was bereft - and free.

Razgut did not hope, but wished. For flight, for home, for forgiveness.

.

.

.

And, to that end, he needed the wish-daughter.


	5. Home

_"The portal they pushed me through, a thousand years ago. I know where it is. I'll show you, but you have to take me with you." A hitch in his breathing, and he whispered, "I just want to go home."_

* * *

It would be hard to forget the spot where he had finally crashed to the ground. The desert spread uniformly in all directions, this place indistinguishable from the rest in the deep night, but he knew where the sky had ended and anguish had begun.

And, for the first time in a thousand years, Razgut did not feel the pain that usually accompanied the memory. _He was going to _fly _again_. After all his endless waiting, he would finally slip the surly bonds of earth and rejoin his brothers in the sky.

"Are you ready, or are you just going to keep daydreaming?"

Karou's tense voice sliced through Razgut's rapture, and he scowled at her for the reminder that she was making his wish for him; that she would not, in fact, even allow him to touch the leaden gavriel, poisonous to him though its magic might might be.

She turned away roughly, dragging the heavy disc from her satchel, whispered his wish in the guttural Chimaera tongue. If he had not been so lost in delirium, Razgut might have noticed how she hesitated first; how her phrase contained a few more syllables than such a simple wish ought to have done.

But then the Fallen seraph felt his crumpled figure rise inexplicably off the ground, tilted his head as if being baptized by the stars. He could not see the portal from here, but he knew it was there, up in the sanctity of space.

Karou leapt into the air in one fluid motion, seemingly as eager as he was to leave behind this world for Eretz. Razgut followed - Fallen no longer - retracing the path among the stars taken so long ago.

And there it was.

Just a slash in the sky - but more, so much more. He hesitated only a little before edging his torso into it, feeling the faint metallic sense and vertigo that heralded the transition to a different universe.

The world of angels seemed to blossom out of the night; Razgut almost gasped at the intensity of the emotion that surged through him, like starlight that danced with silvered wings. Pain was gone; longing was gone.

.

.

.

He was home.

* * *

**A/N: There might be one or two more chapters after this. If any phrases look familiar (other than from the book, of course), you might recognize them from the poem "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee. If not, it's definitely worth a read.**


	6. Beginnings and Endings

_They let them in. Razgut and Elazael, Iaoth and Dvira, Kleos and Arieth. They didn't mean to. It wasn't their fault.  
Except that of course it was their fault. They cut the portal, one too far.  
But how were they to have known?_

* * *

He was home, and he remembered.

The beasts had come, and all was eclipsed. Meliz eternal was, simply, not. All was devoured.

Time had seemed slow as honey as the Twelve were taught the forbidden secrets of the universes. Not so, now: the seconds flew upon them, birds of prey. _Beasts are coming! Flee! Beasts are coming!_

It wasn't their fault. How were they to have known?

The Stelians, fire-eyed and proud: they had been the first to castigate the remaining four of the Six, who had slipped through the portal first with not a care for the rest. And this time, no one shunned the seraph tribe as they had during the Choosing, but turned against the Faerers with astonishing vengeance. They should have died. They would have.

It had been the magi, eluding their own share of the blame, who had intervened in time, stolen the glorious memories of Meliz as well the Cataclysm. No one would remember the damnation of the Faerers.

No one would remember the glory that had been theirs.

All the seraphim were to start a new life in the world which the magi called Eretz. All but _them_: Razgut, Elazael, Kleos, Arieth. They had no right to this place. Not anymore.

It was the Stelians, too, who had mandated that the Four be stripped of their wings, cast out of the portals they had made. Four portals, four traitors. Call it fate, call it spite.

They tortured him long into the night. Penitence for a million deaths, they said. He wanted to scream at the injustice, but kept it in, festering. Those seraphs' lives had ended quickly, but his torment continued for hours on end.

And so at last Razgut found himself on the precipice between worlds, and knew.

.

.

.

There was no end for him, for he was pain, and pain was eternal.


	7. Oh, Glory

_They would be remembered forever. Venerated. Heroes of their people, the openers of doors, the lights in the darkness. All would be glory._

* * *

He looked out of a doorway between two universes and saw a sky rapturous with stars.

.

He tasted the beauty of a beast sheathed in ivory and lapis.

.

He breathed in the changing air of the rising and falling of empires from his perch on a shadow's back.

.

He felt a tingle in his wing-spurs as he watched an angel's flight from a glass-encrusted street.

.

He heard the calling of larks far below as he climbed a deliriously blue sky.

.

And he knew the cataclysmic terror and pain that had led him to this moment. After a thousand years, he was home. But not redeemed, oh no. Never that. He was still Fallen, though he might fly. He was still broken.

What was glory?

Was it the exaltation of being chosen, set apart from his people? Was it the pride of a new world being claimed for his own?

Or was it a single sense preserved in time, whose beauty made all the pain he had suffered worth it, for an instant? See, taste, smell, touch, hear. Know.

Memories carried pain, but they also bore hope. Razgut had wished for a thousand years that he might find forgiveness, but never had he held onto any hope for himself. Hope, he realized, was the only way he could be remade. Wishing was to live in the pain of the past, but hoping was to find beauty in memory - and move on.

Could he? Would he?

He had lived a thousand years in the glories of days past.

Now he would share the beauty and the pain, set them free, and hope instead. For an end, for a beginning, for a world remade.

.

.

.

For the only glory he now desired: forgiveness.


End file.
